"Dreams, the impartial outcome of our entire being. . ." And Other Aphorisms
7.1 To make known the weaknesses of the great is a kind of duty: in doing so one comforts thousands without doing the great any harm. D'Alembert's letter on Rousseau in the Mercure de France, September 1779, deserves to be better known.
*7.3 Herr Camper related that when a missionary painted the flames of Hell to a congregation of Greenlanders in a truly vivid fashion, and described at length the heat they gave out, all the Greenlanders began to feel a strong desire to go to Hell.
7.7 What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.
7.10 Men who know well how to observe themselves and are secretly proud of it often rejoice at the discovery of a weakness in themselves when the discovery ought to disturb them. That much higher do many rate the professor over the man.
7.17 People find it harder to believe in miracles than in traditions of miracles, and many a Turk, Jew etc., who will now let himself be killed for his tradition would have remained very calm and composed had he been witness to the miracle when it happened . . .
7.21 The heroes of the poets of antiquity are very different from those in, e.g., Milton. They are brave, shrewd and wise, but seldom amiable or compassionate in the sense of our morality. Milton took his from the Bible. Does our Christian morality perhaps have its origin in a certain weakness, in a Jewish cowardice, while the other is founded on strength? Universal acceptability is perhaps only a fair chimera and something that will never be attained.
7.24 To make man as religion wants him to be resembles the undertaking of the Stoics: it is only another grade of the impossible.
7.27 How happily many a man would live if he concerned himself with other people's affairs as little as he does with his own.
7.31 A great genius will seldom make his discoveries on paths frequented by others. When he discovers things he usually also discovers the path to discovery.
*7.32 Popular presentation is today all too oten that which puts the mob in a position to talk of something without understanding it.
7.33 The plain style of writing is to be recommended if only because no honest man takes elaborate pains over what he says.
7.40 If someone left 100,000 Louis d'or to the greatest rogue in Germany, how many claimants there would be to the legacy!
*8.2 Among those things that have most made me smile is the idea entertained by certain missionaries of baptizing a whole yardful of proselytes with a fire-engine . . .
8.3 There is a great difference between believing something and being unable to believe its opposite. I can very often believe something without being able to prove it, just as I do not believe something without being able to refute it. The stance I adopt will be determined not by strict proof but by preponderance of evidence.
8.5 I believe the surest way of promoting the progress of mankind would be through the civilizing of the natural talents of the barbarian (who stands between the savage and the civilized man) by means of philosophy communicated by the polished reason of the civilized man. If the savage and the barbarian should ever vanish from the world it will be all up with us.
8.9 There are truths which go around so dressed up you would take them for lies, but which are pure truths nonetheless.
8.11 An imaginary incapacity can with timid people long play the role of a real one, in works of the head just as much as of the body.
*8.12 Because people have such a strong tendency to put things off and take things slowly, so that what ought to happen at five in the morning commonly takes place at six, you can count for certain on retaining the upper hand in any matter if you do everything without the slightest delay.
8.21 It is a great trick of oratory sometimes merely to persuade people when you could have convinced them; then they will ofen think they have been convinced when in fact all you are able to do is merely persuade them.
8.22 Nothing arouses the curiosity of youth more than fragments of useful knowledge interwoven into pleasing poetry. Thomson's Seasons is a masterpiece in this, and must have awoken a love of nature in many an Englishman.
8.24 One begets the idea, another is godfather at its baptism, the third begets children by it, the fourth visits it on its deathbed, and the fifth buries it.
8.25 Not only did he not believe in ghosts, he wasn't even aftraid of them.
8.32 Our false philosphy is incorporated in our entire language; we can, so to speak, not reason without reasoning falsely. We fail, to consider that speaking, regardless of what, is a philosophy . . . Our whole philosophy is rectification of colloquial linguistic usage, thus rectification of a philosophy, and indeed of the most universal and general . . .
8.34 One cannot too often reflect that the existence of a God, the immortality of the soul, and the like are things merely conceivable, not perceptible. They are combinations of ideas, thought-games, to which nothing objective needs to correspond. . . .
8.35 To say we perceive external objects is contradictory; it is impossible for man to go outside himself. When we believe we are seeing objects we are seeing only ourselves. We can really perceive nothing in the world except ourselves and the changes that take place in us. It is likewise impossible for us to feel for others, as it is customary to say we do; we feel only for ourselves. The proposition sounds a harsh one, but it is not when it is correctly understood. We love neither father, nor mother, nor wife, nor child: what we love are the pleasant sensations they produce in us . . . Nothing else is at all possible, and he who denies this proposition cannot have understood it . . .
*8.36 Rational free-spirits are the light brigade who go on ahead and reconnoitre the ground which they heavy brigade of the orthodox will eventually occupy.
8.37 The ass seems to me like the horse translated into Dutch.
8.38 What am I? What shall I do? What can I believe and hope for? Eveything in philosphy can be reduced to this . . .
9.3 Where we experience no localized sensation, where we do not actually feel an impression on our organs of sense, we cannot reduce anything to bodily effects. If we were unable to close our eyes we would not know whether we see with our head or with our belly . . .
9.4 If the New Testament faithfully transmits the precepts of the Christian religion then the Catholic religion is hardly Christian . . . The Catholic religion received its present form during ages of the grossest ignorance; it is impossible for a man again permitted to employ his reason to continue to adhere to it - it can be maintained only by fire and sword.
*10.9 One use of dreams is that, unprejudiced by our often forced and artificial reflections, they represent the impartial outcome of our entire being. This thought deserves to be taken very much to heart.
10.20 Alas, he exclaimed when things went wrong, if only I had done something pleasantly wicked this morning I would at least know why I am suffering now!
*10.24 When in a dream I dispute with someone and he contradicts and instructs me it is I who am instructing myself, that is to say reflecting. This reflection thus presents itself in the form of conversation. Can we be surprised, therefore, if earlier people expressed their thoughts about the serpent (as with Eve) with: the serpent spoke to me. The Lord spoke to me. My spirit spoke to me. Since we do not know where we think, we can remove our thoughts to wherever we wish. Just as we can speak so that he who hears us believes the voice is coming from a third person, so we can think, too, as though we were being spoken to. Genius Sokratis, etc. What an astonishing amount may we not yet learn from dreams.
Showing posts with label Lichtenberg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lichtenberg. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Monday, May 17, 2010
The Art of Having Something to Say Part 10: Lichtenberg
"When sometimes I had drunk a lot of coffee. . ." and Other Aphorisms
1.5 Rousseau was right to call accent the soul of speech, and we often regard people as stupid and when we look into it we find it is merely the simple sound of their manner of speaking.
1.7 If we want to draw up a philosophy that will be useful to us in life, or if we want to offer universal rules for a perpetually contented life, then, to be sure, we have to abstract from that which introduces a much too great diversity into our contemplations - somewhat as we often do in mathematics when we forget friction and other similar particular properties of bodies so that the calculation will not be too difficult for us, or at least replace such properties with a single letter. Small misfortunes incontestably introduce a large measure of uncertainty into these practical rules, so that we have to dismiss them from our mind and turn our attention only to overcoming the greater misfortunes. This is incontestably the true meaning of certain propositions of the Stoic philosophy.
1.16 When sometimes I had drunk a lot of coffee, and was consequently startled by anything, I noticed quite distinctly that I was startled before I heard the noise: we thus hear as it were with other organs as well as with our ears.
1.20 A sensation expressed in words is like music described in words: the expressions we use are not sufficiently at one with the thing to be expressed. The poet who wants to excite sympathy directs the reader to a painting, and through this to the thing to be expressed. A painted landscape gives instant delight, but one celebrated in verse has first to be painted in the reader's own head. . .
1.25 The animalcula infusoria are bladders with desires.
1.26 It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure, the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.
1.29 The contention over signification and being which has caused such mischief in religion would perhaps have been more salutary if it had been conducted in respect to other subjects, for it is a general source of misfortune to us that we believe things are in actuality what they in fact only signify.
1.32 When Plato says the passions and natural desires are the wings of the soul he expresses himself in a very instructive way: such comparisons illuminate the subject and are as it were the translation of difficult concepts into a language familiar to everyone - true definitions.
1.35 The peasant who believes the moon is no bigger than a plough wheel never reflects that at a distance of a few miles a whole church appears only as a white speck but the moon on the contrary seems always to be the same size: what prevents him from connecting these ideas, which are all presented to hm distinctly? In his ordinary life he does in fact connect ideas and perhaps does so by more artificial connections than these. This reflection should make the philosopher pay heed: perhaps in some of the connections he makes he is still a peasant. We think early in life but we do not know we are thinking, any more than we know we are growing or digesting; many ordinary people never do discover it. Close observation of external things easily leads back to the point of observation, ourselves, and conversely he who is for once wholly aware of himself easily proceeds from that to obseving things around him. Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.
1.37 The philosophy of mankind as such is the philosophy of one certain individual man corrected by the philosophy of others, even of fools, and this in accordance with the rules of a rational assessment of degrees of probability. Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.
1.38 To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject. Cautiousness in judgements is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
2.10 Everyone ought to study at least as much philosophy and belles lettres as will serve to heighten his sensual pleasures, If our country squires, courtiers, counts and others took note of this they would often be astounded at the effect a book can produce. . .
2.14 Character of someone I know. His body is such that even a bad draughtsman could draw it better in the dark, and if it lay in his power to alter it many parts of it would be less obtrusive. Although his health is not of the best, this man has always been more or less content with it, and he possesses to a high degree the gift of making good use of healthy days. On such days his imagination, the most loyal of his companions, never deserts him; he stands at the window with his head between his hands, and if the passer-by sees nothing but a moper with his head in his hands he himself often silently confesses he has again been indulging in an excess of pleasure. He has but few friends, in fact his heart is open only to one who is actually present, though for several who are absent; his courtesy and complaisance make many believe he is their friend, and he does indeed serve them, but it is out of ambition or philanthropy, and not from the instinct that drives him to be a servant of his real friends. He has loved only once or twice, the first time not unhappily but the second time very happily; he gained through cheerfulness and levity alone a good heart through which he now often forgets both, though he will always revere cheerfulness and levity as qualities of his own soul which have procured for him the pleasantest hours of his life; and if he could choose another life and another soul I do not know that he would choose different ones if he could have his own back again. Even as a boy he was very free and independent of mind as regards religion, but never thought it would do him honour to be a free-spirit, nor however that to believe everything without exception would do him honour either. He is capable of fevent prayer and has never been able to read the 90th Psalm without an indescribable feeling of exaltation. Before the mountains were brought forth etc. means infinitely more to him than Sing, immortal soul etc. He does not know whom he hates more, young officers or young clergymen, but he could not live long with either of them. For assemblies his figure and his dress have seldom been good enough or his sentiments sufficiently - . He hopes never to have more than three courses for lunch and two for dinner, with a little wine, or less than potatoes, apples, bread and also a little wine every day: more than the one and less than the other would both make him unwell, as they always have done when for a few days he has lived beyond their boundaries. Reading and writing are as necessary to him as eating and drinking, and he hopes he will never be without books. He thinks about death very often and never with aversion; he wishes he could think about everything with so much composure, and hopes his Creator will one day demand of him gently a life of which he was, though not a particularly economical, a by no means profligate possessor.
2.17 He was so witty that any thing served him as an intermediate term for comparing any pair of other things with one another.
2.18 It is silly to assert that we are sometimes not really in the mood for anything; I believe that the moment in which we feel strong enough to suppress one of our principal drives, namely the drive to work and act, is the moment when we are perhaps best fitted to undertake the strangest and greatest things. The state we are in is a kind of langour in which the soul percieves as much that is uncommonly small as when in a state of ardent enthusiasm it does that which is uncommonly big; and as this latter state can be compared with the bold undertakings of the astronomers, so the former can be compared with the exertions of a Leeuwenhoek [ ].
2.21 Human pride is a strange thing, it is not easy to suppress: when hole A has been stoped up, before you know it it is peering out of hole B, and if that is closed it is already behind hole C, etc.
2.25 Sometimes I do not go out of the house for a week and live very contentedly: an equal period of house-arrest would make me ill. Where freedom is possible we move easily in our circle; where thought is under constraint even permitted thoughts come forth nervously.
2.27 Drinking, provided it is not indulged in before the age of 35, is not so greatly to be censured as many of my readers will imagine. This is approximately the time when a man emerges from the aberrant paths of his life out on to the plateau upon which he sees his future course lying open before him. It is depressing if, now discovering it is not the right course, his should be too weak on his feet at this stage to seek another. Should this discovery be attended by a sense of disquietude, experience has taught that wine sometimes works miracles; that five or six glasses put a man in the situation he has otherwise failed to attain . . .
2.30 He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.
1.5 Rousseau was right to call accent the soul of speech, and we often regard people as stupid and when we look into it we find it is merely the simple sound of their manner of speaking.
1.7 If we want to draw up a philosophy that will be useful to us in life, or if we want to offer universal rules for a perpetually contented life, then, to be sure, we have to abstract from that which introduces a much too great diversity into our contemplations - somewhat as we often do in mathematics when we forget friction and other similar particular properties of bodies so that the calculation will not be too difficult for us, or at least replace such properties with a single letter. Small misfortunes incontestably introduce a large measure of uncertainty into these practical rules, so that we have to dismiss them from our mind and turn our attention only to overcoming the greater misfortunes. This is incontestably the true meaning of certain propositions of the Stoic philosophy.
1.16 When sometimes I had drunk a lot of coffee, and was consequently startled by anything, I noticed quite distinctly that I was startled before I heard the noise: we thus hear as it were with other organs as well as with our ears.
1.20 A sensation expressed in words is like music described in words: the expressions we use are not sufficiently at one with the thing to be expressed. The poet who wants to excite sympathy directs the reader to a painting, and through this to the thing to be expressed. A painted landscape gives instant delight, but one celebrated in verse has first to be painted in the reader's own head. . .
1.25 The animalcula infusoria are bladders with desires.
1.26 It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure, the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.
1.29 The contention over signification and being which has caused such mischief in religion would perhaps have been more salutary if it had been conducted in respect to other subjects, for it is a general source of misfortune to us that we believe things are in actuality what they in fact only signify.
1.32 When Plato says the passions and natural desires are the wings of the soul he expresses himself in a very instructive way: such comparisons illuminate the subject and are as it were the translation of difficult concepts into a language familiar to everyone - true definitions.
1.35 The peasant who believes the moon is no bigger than a plough wheel never reflects that at a distance of a few miles a whole church appears only as a white speck but the moon on the contrary seems always to be the same size: what prevents him from connecting these ideas, which are all presented to hm distinctly? In his ordinary life he does in fact connect ideas and perhaps does so by more artificial connections than these. This reflection should make the philosopher pay heed: perhaps in some of the connections he makes he is still a peasant. We think early in life but we do not know we are thinking, any more than we know we are growing or digesting; many ordinary people never do discover it. Close observation of external things easily leads back to the point of observation, ourselves, and conversely he who is for once wholly aware of himself easily proceeds from that to obseving things around him. Be attentive, feel nothing in vain, measure and compare: this is the whole law of philosophy.
1.37 The philosophy of mankind as such is the philosophy of one certain individual man corrected by the philosophy of others, even of fools, and this in accordance with the rules of a rational assessment of degrees of probability. Propositions on which all men are in agreement are true: if they are not true we have no truth at all.
1.38 To grow wiser means to learn to know better and better the faults to which this instrument with which we feel and judge can be subject. Cautiousness in judgements is nowadays to be recommended to each and every one: if we gained only one incontestable truth every ten years from each of our philosophical writers the harvest we reaped would be sufficient.
2.10 Everyone ought to study at least as much philosophy and belles lettres as will serve to heighten his sensual pleasures, If our country squires, courtiers, counts and others took note of this they would often be astounded at the effect a book can produce. . .
2.14 Character of someone I know. His body is such that even a bad draughtsman could draw it better in the dark, and if it lay in his power to alter it many parts of it would be less obtrusive. Although his health is not of the best, this man has always been more or less content with it, and he possesses to a high degree the gift of making good use of healthy days. On such days his imagination, the most loyal of his companions, never deserts him; he stands at the window with his head between his hands, and if the passer-by sees nothing but a moper with his head in his hands he himself often silently confesses he has again been indulging in an excess of pleasure. He has but few friends, in fact his heart is open only to one who is actually present, though for several who are absent; his courtesy and complaisance make many believe he is their friend, and he does indeed serve them, but it is out of ambition or philanthropy, and not from the instinct that drives him to be a servant of his real friends. He has loved only once or twice, the first time not unhappily but the second time very happily; he gained through cheerfulness and levity alone a good heart through which he now often forgets both, though he will always revere cheerfulness and levity as qualities of his own soul which have procured for him the pleasantest hours of his life; and if he could choose another life and another soul I do not know that he would choose different ones if he could have his own back again. Even as a boy he was very free and independent of mind as regards religion, but never thought it would do him honour to be a free-spirit, nor however that to believe everything without exception would do him honour either. He is capable of fevent prayer and has never been able to read the 90th Psalm without an indescribable feeling of exaltation. Before the mountains were brought forth etc. means infinitely more to him than Sing, immortal soul etc. He does not know whom he hates more, young officers or young clergymen, but he could not live long with either of them. For assemblies his figure and his dress have seldom been good enough or his sentiments sufficiently - . He hopes never to have more than three courses for lunch and two for dinner, with a little wine, or less than potatoes, apples, bread and also a little wine every day: more than the one and less than the other would both make him unwell, as they always have done when for a few days he has lived beyond their boundaries. Reading and writing are as necessary to him as eating and drinking, and he hopes he will never be without books. He thinks about death very often and never with aversion; he wishes he could think about everything with so much composure, and hopes his Creator will one day demand of him gently a life of which he was, though not a particularly economical, a by no means profligate possessor.
2.17 He was so witty that any thing served him as an intermediate term for comparing any pair of other things with one another.
2.18 It is silly to assert that we are sometimes not really in the mood for anything; I believe that the moment in which we feel strong enough to suppress one of our principal drives, namely the drive to work and act, is the moment when we are perhaps best fitted to undertake the strangest and greatest things. The state we are in is a kind of langour in which the soul percieves as much that is uncommonly small as when in a state of ardent enthusiasm it does that which is uncommonly big; and as this latter state can be compared with the bold undertakings of the astronomers, so the former can be compared with the exertions of a Leeuwenhoek [ ].
2.21 Human pride is a strange thing, it is not easy to suppress: when hole A has been stoped up, before you know it it is peering out of hole B, and if that is closed it is already behind hole C, etc.
2.25 Sometimes I do not go out of the house for a week and live very contentedly: an equal period of house-arrest would make me ill. Where freedom is possible we move easily in our circle; where thought is under constraint even permitted thoughts come forth nervously.
2.27 Drinking, provided it is not indulged in before the age of 35, is not so greatly to be censured as many of my readers will imagine. This is approximately the time when a man emerges from the aberrant paths of his life out on to the plateau upon which he sees his future course lying open before him. It is depressing if, now discovering it is not the right course, his should be too weak on his feet at this stage to seek another. Should this discovery be attended by a sense of disquietude, experience has taught that wine sometimes works miracles; that five or six glasses put a man in the situation he has otherwise failed to attain . . .
2.30 He was then in his fifty-fourth year, when even in the case of poets reason and passion begin to discuss a peace treaty and usually conclude it not very long afterwards.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Aphoristic Mixed Dips 2 (2001)
For everyone who's been encouraging me for years to go public with the aphoristic bits and pieces I used to write lots of - today a little more of a selection. I'm putting them up with hesitation, after fiddling round with them for too long - I think maybe because, looking back with the benefit of many years' hindsight, they seem imitative and a touch antiquated - harking back, as they do, to the days when I wrote on the assumption that it was possible to make WEIGHTY PRONOUNCEMENTS about LIFE, THE UNIVERSE AND EVERYTHING without charging your pen with any of the masterful concept-laden opinions that ten years' labour have made known to me under the names of Adorno, Weber, Redner, Boehme.
The model I can hear and see most in the background in retrospect is G.C. Lichtenberg - the problem with CS the 25-year-old aphorist is not just that he is antiquated but that he was a bit of an antiquarian to start with. There's the hunchback professor, unmistakably second-hand, everywhere - in the tone of the pieces and in the way they compiled themselves: by chance, in scrapbooks, quarantined from diary-writing, university labour and from any impulse to form them into a philosophical system or a comprehensive account of himself. - Neither of those are flaws in themselves maybe, though what is a flaw is that in writing "philosophy by half-measures" like Lichtenberg I borrowed a touch too easily from his self-conception - that of an amusing, bemused character who made an art, or an arty hobby at least, of doubting his experiences : "Alas, he exclaimed when things went wrong" - says Lichtenberg, thinking clearly of himself - "if only I had done something pleasantly wicked this morning I would at least know why I am suffering now!" - which is surely the problem of theodicy inverted and reduced to the pea-sized. Or take one of his earlier fantasies:
"Zezu Island. This island had remained undescribed for so long because the foolish customs of its inhabitants gave publishers everywhere the idea that an account of it was a satire on their own country. . ."
- which always reminded me of Australia, and was penned a mere three years before European settlement. . .
In any case - ten years after they were whipped up, a second serve of mixed dips - hopefully not stale, inedible or completely off. Time maybe to shut the bottom desk-drawer where they've been mouldering for so many years and get the best of GCL down from the top shelf again? CS
Philosophy by Half-Measures
The idea of God shares with good fiction and bad philosophy the attribute of being infinitely interpretable - which might be a reason for thinking it a half-way house between the two.
The mindset of many of many intellectuals has really centred on the question whether lack of intellect is a sin.
The realm of the spiritual is fundamentally an answer to sickness-unto-death and paralysing heartache. People's sense for the spiritual will diminish the more we socially conceal from ourselves the experiential possibility of sickness-unto-death, but it can never be properly concealed and paralysing heartache can hardly be either, so spirituality will always remain, increasingly as an incompletely concealed tantalising possibility on the margins of experience.
The only evidence I can think of for the X'n world-view is the existence in paint catalogues of colours whose names are arbitrarily concocted by their manufacturers to appeal to the vapid sensibilities of the hordes of interior decorators.
Marx could only be considered a philosopher in a world that had descended into its own ninth circle via political theory.
If you asked my to come up with a picture of truth then I would suggest one whose paradoxicality took on a sort of logical form. "This was once a paradox, but now the times prove it true," says Hamlet. And subsequently the times proved it a tautology.
Unless we actually build up a strong-minded picture of our weaknesses we are incapable of liberality towards ourselves or being cheerful about ourselves in a sense which differes from simply going easy on ourselves. Going easy on yourself in this sense is the stream in which all our weaknesses flow faster and to more dramatic effect.
At the root of much of the religious sentiment of today is a nostalgia for the certainty and coherence which the days of the primacy of religion are thought to have had. But it is another question altogether whether the era of religion was actually marked by anything we could recognise as certainty and coherence. Coherence and certainty, in short, are probably far rarer things than the existence of vigorous religious movements is likely to suggest. What exists of them in the world - except to the extent that the world is seen in the warm regretful light of religious nostalgia - is constitutionally more sickly and subtle than we would like to acknowledge. The very availability of the notions of certainty and coherence gets us into this mess in the first place. The existence of the concepts makes them seem attainable, because in essence we are wishful beings.
Philosophy, it seems to me, is the great unnatural cure for melancholy. - Question from one my readers: What does that make the great natural cure for melancholy? The answer of course is sex, combined with a heightened sense of the natural.
Everything is capable of being treated as a fact, or at least according to its value as fact, however everything and nothing is capable of being treated as heavenly intervention in the affairs of the world.
Those who constantly have at their disposal a few substantial little ideas live best. Life in the company of one big idea is enough to make any human being obtuse, having many big ideas makes for gloominess and ruined nerves, many little ideas are hard to keep in sight let alone catch hold of all the time. Life in the company of ideas of no substance is by definition null and void, willed idea-less is humbug, although it has to be said that thinking in clichés is usual and lack of presence of mind can be irresistible.
Goethe simply ought to have said - morality is no more and no less than staring down one's demons.
The real meaning of the remark that irony is the modern mode is that irony is the best modern weapon of knowledge.
If you are going to be a moralist - no doubt the fate of many - then the least you can do is be inscrutable.
If aphorisms are like definitions then there is no tradition of the aphorism in English because in England it was always assumed that the definitions of words and thoughts must state something basic and common to everything coming under the definition, whereas a definition can also set out the rarest things and those that leave us a prey to fears. We think of definitions as a well-considered jump into the light, but they could just as well be a fitful jump in the dark.
The opposite of philosophy is not thoughtlessness but pure contemplation of images.
Self-knowledge is the alpha and omega of all knowledge, the silver fetter preventing knowledge from disbanding by means of its own centrifugal force.
Too much contemplation of the sources of inspiration tends to turn inspiration aside. Unceasing reverence for the same thing becomes by its nature lugubrious and dull.
La Rochefoucauld says that to be known well things must be known in detail, but as detail is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect. But the argument in the opposite direction works just as well. To be known well things must be known in all their interconnections with other things. Although getting to known them well may in part have to do with acquiring the necessary details, it is mainly a matter of comparing them with a wide range of similar and differnt things, as well as a constant process of obtaining a perfectly apt picture of them from fewer and fewer details.
The clearest sign that a man or woman is incurably in love is that they can only bear seeing the loved one on their own very strict terms. Lovesickness is the co-existence of a state of inspiration and shattered nerves.
The only intelligent modern-day contributions to classical wisdom are ironic ones.
No so-called moral problem can be solved satisfactorily without reference to moral authority, and the fountainhead of moral authority is always metaphysics, of varying degrees of phoneyness. So really the closest you can get to a "solution" that avoids all phoneyness is a question-mark, that is to say - a clear-minded statement of the problem itself. But that is just as clearly not a solution - and honest moral philosophy, which doesn't deliquesce into art or something else, bites its own tail ad infinitum.
Historical
The nineteenth and twentieth century's partiality for literary and philosophical fragments is among other things a continuation of the neo-classical veneration of ruins.
Historians 500 years from now will be at one in thinking that the French Revolution did not inaugurate an age of revolutionary transformation so much as an age of the cult of revolutionary transformation. The volume and multiplicity of interpretation of the French Revolution will count as one of its principle effects.
The total process of life is in a fundamental sense a process of aestheticisation. In rationalising man the eighteenth century gave him a nice little touch-up. Nowadays our psychological categories turn up as aesthetic ones, but once we have left off idolising well-fuelled narcissism, amusing neurotics and exciting psychopaths, once the brilliant sheen of these flashy conceptual instruments has worn off, the world may again appear in a benign light.
The model I can hear and see most in the background in retrospect is G.C. Lichtenberg - the problem with CS the 25-year-old aphorist is not just that he is antiquated but that he was a bit of an antiquarian to start with. There's the hunchback professor, unmistakably second-hand, everywhere - in the tone of the pieces and in the way they compiled themselves: by chance, in scrapbooks, quarantined from diary-writing, university labour and from any impulse to form them into a philosophical system or a comprehensive account of himself. - Neither of those are flaws in themselves maybe, though what is a flaw is that in writing "philosophy by half-measures" like Lichtenberg I borrowed a touch too easily from his self-conception - that of an amusing, bemused character who made an art, or an arty hobby at least, of doubting his experiences : "Alas, he exclaimed when things went wrong" - says Lichtenberg, thinking clearly of himself - "if only I had done something pleasantly wicked this morning I would at least know why I am suffering now!" - which is surely the problem of theodicy inverted and reduced to the pea-sized. Or take one of his earlier fantasies:
"Zezu Island. This island had remained undescribed for so long because the foolish customs of its inhabitants gave publishers everywhere the idea that an account of it was a satire on their own country. . ."
- which always reminded me of Australia, and was penned a mere three years before European settlement. . .
In any case - ten years after they were whipped up, a second serve of mixed dips - hopefully not stale, inedible or completely off. Time maybe to shut the bottom desk-drawer where they've been mouldering for so many years and get the best of GCL down from the top shelf again? CS
Philosophy by Half-Measures
The idea of God shares with good fiction and bad philosophy the attribute of being infinitely interpretable - which might be a reason for thinking it a half-way house between the two.
The mindset of many of many intellectuals has really centred on the question whether lack of intellect is a sin.
The realm of the spiritual is fundamentally an answer to sickness-unto-death and paralysing heartache. People's sense for the spiritual will diminish the more we socially conceal from ourselves the experiential possibility of sickness-unto-death, but it can never be properly concealed and paralysing heartache can hardly be either, so spirituality will always remain, increasingly as an incompletely concealed tantalising possibility on the margins of experience.
The only evidence I can think of for the X'n world-view is the existence in paint catalogues of colours whose names are arbitrarily concocted by their manufacturers to appeal to the vapid sensibilities of the hordes of interior decorators.
Marx could only be considered a philosopher in a world that had descended into its own ninth circle via political theory.
If you asked my to come up with a picture of truth then I would suggest one whose paradoxicality took on a sort of logical form. "This was once a paradox, but now the times prove it true," says Hamlet. And subsequently the times proved it a tautology.
Unless we actually build up a strong-minded picture of our weaknesses we are incapable of liberality towards ourselves or being cheerful about ourselves in a sense which differes from simply going easy on ourselves. Going easy on yourself in this sense is the stream in which all our weaknesses flow faster and to more dramatic effect.
At the root of much of the religious sentiment of today is a nostalgia for the certainty and coherence which the days of the primacy of religion are thought to have had. But it is another question altogether whether the era of religion was actually marked by anything we could recognise as certainty and coherence. Coherence and certainty, in short, are probably far rarer things than the existence of vigorous religious movements is likely to suggest. What exists of them in the world - except to the extent that the world is seen in the warm regretful light of religious nostalgia - is constitutionally more sickly and subtle than we would like to acknowledge. The very availability of the notions of certainty and coherence gets us into this mess in the first place. The existence of the concepts makes them seem attainable, because in essence we are wishful beings.
Philosophy, it seems to me, is the great unnatural cure for melancholy. - Question from one my readers: What does that make the great natural cure for melancholy? The answer of course is sex, combined with a heightened sense of the natural.
Everything is capable of being treated as a fact, or at least according to its value as fact, however everything and nothing is capable of being treated as heavenly intervention in the affairs of the world.
Those who constantly have at their disposal a few substantial little ideas live best. Life in the company of one big idea is enough to make any human being obtuse, having many big ideas makes for gloominess and ruined nerves, many little ideas are hard to keep in sight let alone catch hold of all the time. Life in the company of ideas of no substance is by definition null and void, willed idea-less is humbug, although it has to be said that thinking in clichés is usual and lack of presence of mind can be irresistible.
Goethe simply ought to have said - morality is no more and no less than staring down one's demons.
The real meaning of the remark that irony is the modern mode is that irony is the best modern weapon of knowledge.
If you are going to be a moralist - no doubt the fate of many - then the least you can do is be inscrutable.
If aphorisms are like definitions then there is no tradition of the aphorism in English because in England it was always assumed that the definitions of words and thoughts must state something basic and common to everything coming under the definition, whereas a definition can also set out the rarest things and those that leave us a prey to fears. We think of definitions as a well-considered jump into the light, but they could just as well be a fitful jump in the dark.
The opposite of philosophy is not thoughtlessness but pure contemplation of images.
Self-knowledge is the alpha and omega of all knowledge, the silver fetter preventing knowledge from disbanding by means of its own centrifugal force.
Too much contemplation of the sources of inspiration tends to turn inspiration aside. Unceasing reverence for the same thing becomes by its nature lugubrious and dull.
La Rochefoucauld says that to be known well things must be known in detail, but as detail is almost infinite, our knowledge is always superficial and imperfect. But the argument in the opposite direction works just as well. To be known well things must be known in all their interconnections with other things. Although getting to known them well may in part have to do with acquiring the necessary details, it is mainly a matter of comparing them with a wide range of similar and differnt things, as well as a constant process of obtaining a perfectly apt picture of them from fewer and fewer details.
The clearest sign that a man or woman is incurably in love is that they can only bear seeing the loved one on their own very strict terms. Lovesickness is the co-existence of a state of inspiration and shattered nerves.
The only intelligent modern-day contributions to classical wisdom are ironic ones.
No so-called moral problem can be solved satisfactorily without reference to moral authority, and the fountainhead of moral authority is always metaphysics, of varying degrees of phoneyness. So really the closest you can get to a "solution" that avoids all phoneyness is a question-mark, that is to say - a clear-minded statement of the problem itself. But that is just as clearly not a solution - and honest moral philosophy, which doesn't deliquesce into art or something else, bites its own tail ad infinitum.
Historical
The nineteenth and twentieth century's partiality for literary and philosophical fragments is among other things a continuation of the neo-classical veneration of ruins.
Historians 500 years from now will be at one in thinking that the French Revolution did not inaugurate an age of revolutionary transformation so much as an age of the cult of revolutionary transformation. The volume and multiplicity of interpretation of the French Revolution will count as one of its principle effects.
The total process of life is in a fundamental sense a process of aestheticisation. In rationalising man the eighteenth century gave him a nice little touch-up. Nowadays our psychological categories turn up as aesthetic ones, but once we have left off idolising well-fuelled narcissism, amusing neurotics and exciting psychopaths, once the brilliant sheen of these flashy conceptual instruments has worn off, the world may again appear in a benign light.
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